Spent the last weeks aggroing over Vista’s Windows Explorer being incredibly sluggish. Just pressing F5 to refresh windows would make it “hang” (the progress bar keeps loading, but there’s never any conclusion).

However, by using ShellExView, I was able to locate the culprit: unlocker (an application intended to identify which processes are keeping locks on files).

After uninstalling the application and restarting explorer, everything was fine and dandy.